1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to the use of a computer network, and more specifically to a method, system, and computer program product for communicating with a computer associated with a particular consumer, based on the consumer's offline purchase history.
As used herein, the term "online" refers to activity having at least one aspect that is performed over a computer network, whereas the term "offline" refers to customer activity that is generally not performed over a computer network. For example, using a computer to buy books over the Internet is an online purchase, whereas buying groceries in a grocery store is an offline purchase.
2. Discussion of the Background
With the proliferation of computer networks such as the Internet, more and more households are able to access wide varieties of information quickly and easily with their home (or work) computers. The increasing number of ordinary consumers who are now accessing the Internet has opened up a new avenue through which commercial entities can deliver their advertisements to consumers. Through computer networks such as the Internet, advertisers are able to display banners to computer users for purposes of generating brand name recognition, distributing promotional information, etc.
As evidenced by the numerous amount of literature in the field, skilled computer programers have developed and refined a variety of methods for accessing, manipulating, and disseminating database information over computer networks such as the Internet. Thus, various methods of storing, delivering, and displaying information are well-known in the field of computer networking. Similarly, standard protocols and architecture have been developed to communicate over wide area networks (WANs); for example, TCP/IP protocols and architecture have been developed for communication over the Internet. Moreover, various languages such as Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) have been developed for performing database operations over computer networks. The design and implementation of various methods of database networking and Internet communications are described in Liu et al., "Managing Internet Information Services," O'Reilly & Associates, Inc., 1994; Comer, "Internet Working with TCP/IP Volume I: Principles, Protocols, and Architecture," 2.sup.nd ed., Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1991; Comer and Stevens, "Internet Working with TCP/IP Volume II: Design, Implementation, and Internals," Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1991; Comer and Stevens, "Internet Working with TCP/IP Vol. III: Client-Server Programming and Applications," Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1993; Khoshafian et al., "A Guide to Developing Client/Server SQL Applications," Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, Inc.; Hamilton et al., "JDBC Database Access with Java, A Tutorial and Annotated Reference," Addison-Wesley Pub. Co., 1997; and Francis et al., "Professional Active Server Pages 2.0," Wrox Press Ltd., 1998; each of which is incorporated herein by reference.
Currently, advertisers are able to implement a limited form of targeted advertising over the Internet. This is accomplished by sending a block of data, such as a "cookie," from a remote host or server (i.e., a Web server) maintained by an advertiser to a computer (i.e., a client system) that has access to the remote server via the World Wide Web. A cookie, as used in network and Internet communication, is a block of data or state object that a Web server stores on a client system. When the client system accesses a Web site within a limited range of domain names, the client system automatically transmits a copy of the cookie to the Web server that serves the Web site. The cookie may include a unique cookie number corresponding to the client system. Thus, the cookie can be used to identify the client system (by identifying the Web browser) and to instruct the server to send a customized copy of the requested Web page to the Web browser.
Since cookies are also used to track a consumer's online activity, a Web server can deliver targeted advertisements to a consumer's Web browser, based on the consumer's online activity. For example, if a cookie tracks the various IP addresses accessed by the consumer's computer, the Web server can deliver ad banners to the consumer's Web browser based on the IP addresses the Web browser has accessed. Thus, the cookie can be used to record the online activity of a consumer, and information regarding the consumer's tastes and tendencies can be inferred from the consumer's online activity. Using this inference, an advertiser can try to target specific advertisements to specific computer consumers, based on the record of the computer consumers' online activities. That is, the advertiser can try to expose the computer consumers to advertisements designed to appeal to their particular tastes and interests.
The targeted advertisement can be implemented in several manners. For example, the advertiser can generate Internet banners that contain targeted ads and are visible to the consumer when the consumer accesses the advertiser's server, and/or the advertiser can automatically generate e-mail messages and send them to the consumer if the advertiser has the consumer's e-mail address.
The disadvantage of generating advertisements based on online activity resides in the fact that a consumer's actions on the Internet (which are known to advertisers because of the cookie sent to the consumer's computer) may not be strongly related to the consumer's preferences as a consumer in the offline world. Thus, a consumer's activity on the Internet, including online purchases and access to various Web sites, may not reflect what the consumer will buy at a shopping mall or supermarket. For example, just because the consumer has accessed a large number of IP addresses corresponding to fly fishing Web pages, there is no indication that the consumer prefers one brand of diet soda over any other.